Ornette: Made in America (Shirley Clarke, 1985)

Restored and reissued by Milestone Film, Ornette: Made in America offers a fascinating visualization of some of the most exciting music of the 20th century. Shirley Clarke's techniques illustrate Ornette's enduring avant-garde chops, as well as the clear melody and structure that runs under even the wildest free jams. As a film about a neglected genius, Ornette could have taken the usual biographical tack of offering an overview of the artist's life interspersed with the plaudits of admirers. But though Clarke does amass some colleagues and friends to sing Ornette's praises, she wisely lets the art have the final say in the worth of its maker, using his contemporary performances as proof that he is still a vital, original voice adding mayhem to the American Songbook.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Stuff I Like: Ornette Coleman

It’s a wonder I ever got into Ornette Coleman at all. When I first started assembling some basic jazz albums for a starter collection for the genre, I included The Shape of Jazz to Come, Coleman’s breakthrough third LP, among my selections. After I’d listened to primer albums by Bird, Miles, Mingus and Satch, I queued up Ornette on my iPod...and damn near broke the thing flinging the device away in shock. What in the hell WAS this?

It’s not that Ornette was so radically unlistenable that I couldn’t come to grips with it; I had, in fact, already listened to and loved works by out-there artists who bore Ornette’s influence, chiefly the magnificently weird Captain Beefheart. But even what little work I’d heard by his disciples didn’t come close to capturing the full energy, the urgency of it. What threw me was not some crackling wall of white noise (which is what I had been expecting) but how asymptotically close the music came to conventional melody, only to burst at the seams with impatience, with exuberant overeagerness. Everything I’d read to prepare myself for Ornette talked about the avant-garde otherworldliness, the historical impact of so daringly titled an album. What they hadn’t mentioned was the joyousness of it all.